EOOffshore: ASCAT Wind Data for the Irish Continental Shelf Region

EOOffshore is a Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) funded project, which commenced in June 2020 in the School of Physics in University College Dublin (UCD). It presents a case study that demonstrates the utility of the Pangeo software ecosystem in the development of offshore wind speed and power density estimates, increasing wind measurement coverage of offshore renewable energy assessment areas in the Irish Continental Shelf (ICS) region. It has involved the creation of a new wind data catalog for this region, consisting of a collection of analysis-ready, cloud-optimized (ARCO) datasets featuring up to 21 years of available in situ, reanalysis, and satellite observation wind data products.

The Copernicus Marine Service (CMS), or Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS), is the marine component of the European Union Copernicus Earth Observation (EO) programme. It provides free, regular and systematic ocean data products on a global and regional scale. The CMS Surface Wind Thematic Assembly Center (Wind TAC) is responsible for the collection, processing, qualification and distribution of surface winds data products derived from scatterometer satellite missions, including near-real time (NRT) and delayed mode (REP) processing of global wind observations. These catalog data sets contain CMS wind speed and direction data products generated using the Advanced SCATterometer (ASCAT) instruments deployed on the Metop satellites.

• eooffshore_ics_cmems_WIND_GLO_WIND_L3_REP_OBSERVATIONS_012_005_MetOp_ASCAT.zarr.tar.gz
  • 2007-2021 data products from the Global Ocean Daily Gridded Reprocessed (REP) Level-3 Sea Surface Winds from Scatterometer data set.
• eooffshore_ics_cmems_WIND_GLO_WIND_L3_NRT_OBSERVATIONS_012_002_MetOp_ASCAT.zarr.tar.gz
  • 2016-2021 data products from the Global Ocean Daily Gridded Near Real Time (NRT) Level-3 Sea Surface Winds from Scatterometer data set.

The products feature 0.125 degree grids, based on 12.5 km scatterometer swath observations, for all combinations of Metop A/B (REP) and Metop A/B/C (NRT) satellites and ASCending, DEScending passes. These ASCAT data sets were used in the EOOffshore project outputs presented (Scalable Offshore Wind Analysis With Pangeo) at the Meeting Exascale Computing Challenges with Compression and Pangeo 2022 EGU General Assembly session.

Description and example usage of the ASCAT data sets in EOOffshore:

• ASCAT Wind Data for Irish Continental Shelf region
• Offshore Wind in Irish Areas Of Interest
• Comparison of Offshore Wind Speed Extrapolation and Power Density Estimation

As requested by the Copernicus Marine Service Service Commitments and Licence, these Zarr stores were:

• Generated using E.U. Copernicus Marine Service Information; https://doi.org/10.48670/moi-00182; https://doi.org/10.48670/moi-00183;